From Campaigning to Ballots: Democracy At Work

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Hello, ladies.

Hello, gentlemen.

This is the Victor Davis-Hanson Show.

I am Jack Fowler, the host, but you are here to listen to the star and namesake of this show.

That is Victor Davis-Hanson.

He is the Martin and Ely Anderson Senior Fellow at the Hoover Institution and the Wayne and Marsha Busky Distinguished Fellow in History at Hillsdale College.

Victor is a best-selling author right now, riding high from the great sales.

Congratulations again, Victor, for the end of everything, which is up there on the bestseller lists.

Victor has a website, The Blade of Perseus.

Its address is victorhanson.com.

And

later on in this episode, I'll tell you why you should.

be subscribing.

We are recording on Saturday, June 22nd.

This particular episode will be out on the 27th, which is the day of the

debate.

I assume it's still five days out, six days out here, but that that is going to happen.

And I'm looking forward to Victor's commentary on that debate in an ensuing podcast that will be held by the great Sammy Wink.

Anyway, today, Victor.

Many important, good things to talk about, to get your wisdom on.

And I think one of the first things we should take on is this great

piece you wrote on X Twitter about

how deranged

the Trump derangement syndrome has gotten.

And we'll get to that.

We'll talk about some FBI intimidation,

some conservative strategizing.

to

block a Democrat nominee should Biden be taken off a ticket?

The concept of time and some new polls.

We'll get to all that right after these important messages.

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We're back with the Victor Davis-Hansen show.

So, Victor,

our listeners know that you are a writing machine.

You're right for

American greatness, a big essay every week, syndicated column.

Several times a week, you're writing your ultra pieces for the blade of Perseus.

But once or twice a week, you also write a significant thought piece

on X.

And you did that

the other day.

Anatomy of a Full Left Wing.

meltdown.

And here's how it began.

The media is a is a fire with warnings of the impending Trump dictatorship.

Celebrities, the squad, and Biden administration grandees buy to conjure up the most nightmarish things that Trump might do to them.

What drives their current mounting hysteria?

That's a question, Victor.

You answer it.

Will you tell us what the answer is?

Well, they are losing their minds when you have Rachel Maddow or people on the View or Stephen Colbert talking about being put in in camps or

this

denying that Joe Biden is enfeebled.

And so

they're crazy.

They're just nonstop.

And so what is behind it?

Well, obviously it's the polls.

Now, Fox had Biden ahead by two points in a national poll, which don't really matter given the Electoral College.

We talked about that with Sammy and you a little bit.

And that represents, I think,

the large, overwhelming left-wing constituencies in Chicago, Illinois and New York and

California, where you might have 80 million people.

But it doesn't represent the inroads that Donald Trump is making among minorities, young people, independent voters, where it counts.

And that means he's ahead three to five points in Arizona, Nevada, Georgia, North Carolina, and maybe one to three points in Pennsylvania, Wisconsin, and Michigan.

But that still was kind of baffling for me that every night we hear two things.

Republicans are getting near record months of fundraising and are almost catching up with the Bidens.

They had that group of tech billionaires that were on, I think, a couple of days ago saying they were thinking about

voting for Trump.

Some of the big donors are actually thinking about him.

So how do you square that circle?

And this poll that came out by Rasmussen does square it.

It shows that Donald Trump is double digits with the third candidate or fourth candidate in addition, but and head-to-head, he's nine points ahead.

This is what I was on Jesse Waters last night, and I tried to make the point that it's very similar to the 1980

race, Jack, because

Jimmy Carter was just deathly afraid of that John Anderson, that third.

He had declared that he was an independent, a former Republican.

And

he ran.

I think he only got 7% of the vote.

Carter would not debate him.

Reagan debated him, just the two of them.

And then they only had one debate.

The same thing they said about Trump.

Reagan was dangerous.

He's crazy.

He's too old.

Carter said he talked to Amy.

They were worried about nuclear warfare.

He's going to get us in a war.

And then people looked at Carter and they said, you know, it's kind of like James Carville's description of the Democrats.

All he did was just scold people.

Man, turn down your thermostats.

Do this.

Do this.

And Reagan was just saying, there'll be no more hostages.

I don't want to get into it.

When I'm president, there will be no more hostages.

And we will cut taxes.

I promise you that.

And we will have a big boom.

You just wait.

And it was all what we can do.

And it's going to be good.

And don't worry, I'm here.

And Carter's was, don't take a chance with him.

And you can't do this.

And it was snarly.

And then we had the stagflation, the inflation, the failed rescue, the hostages, the Soviet invasion of Afghanistan.

There had been

more Middle East tension.

The last, second to the last Gallup poll taken in early, oh, around the 20th of October showed Carter, I think, six to seven points ahead of Reagan.

Some polls had him almost even.

But after that

first and only debate, Reagan

at the time of the election had caught up.

So my point is this,

that

this race looks, and you know, Reagan won by nine points.

And the point I'm making is that this election seems very, very close.

But given the status of the country and given the Biden grouchiness and snaggle puss snarling and cognitive decline and what they have done to the country, and Trump is a much better candidate, he's upbeat, I think they could blow this thing wide open.

And I think that explains why they're so, they must have internal pollings that reflected this Rasmussen poll.

We mentioned earlier that they're projecting, they think, wow, Trump must think just like we do.

If I had gone through all the crap that we threw at him and I got back in power, I would make sure those damn Democrats never dare do.

That's how they think.

I don't think Trump thinks like them.

And then, of course,

where's all this false consciousness coming?

Didn't they read Marx?

Don't these blacks and Asians and young people and Latinos know that what's the matter with Kansas?

Don't they know what's good for them?

We're the one to give them free money.

Don't they like that?

We defunded the police for them.

That kind of anger at their own constituencies.

And then there's a fear about Biden cognitive abilities.

I would say that since I read that he's, we all read that he's off work for a week, he's going to be just completely rested.

And I don't know the various pharmaceuticals that they will give him, but they will give him things that give him that state of the union snarliness, snarkiness, energy.

We saw that in the, again, the Phantom of the Opera speech.

We saw it in

the first debate last time.

And so

put all that together and they're very worried.

And the thing about the left is they want power.

And everybody wants power, but they don't care about anything else.

They don't care about the ultimate effects of the border and their way of thinking, you know what?

We did our job.

We destroyed the border.

We got 10 million.

They'll have to deal with 10 million.

They'll never be able to deport them.

We spent a lot of money.

I know the deficit's big, but you know what?

They're going to have to deal with it.

And that means they're going to have to raise taxes against those awful wealthy people.

That's how they think.

And, you know, we cut back on oil and all that.

We drain the strategic petroleum reserve.

But we did get the point across that, you know, EVs are competitive now and wind and solar.

So they don't really care.

They just have this agenda that they think has been so radical that it's forever changed America and won't be able to be fundamentally untransformed.

And they know it's not popular, but they want it to retain power.

So how do you do that when you're pushing an agenda that nobody wants, but you demand, and we know the answer.

You get Alvin Bragg and Letita James and Fannie Willis, Eugene Carroll, and you try to destroy your opponent.

You try to get him off the ballot.

You name it.

You try to bankrupt him.

Trump has lost several weeks of precious campaign time already.

So we'll see.

I think he'll be a little bit more animated than people think during the bait, though.

I really do, given what they're doing to him.

Well, I'd like to follow up on your

deportation point, Victor.

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Victor,

gosh, this is maybe dreaming a little bit, but I wonder if there is a sufficient turnover in Congress and Congress has the right

to restrict the issues which the judiciary can consider.

And I do think one of the problems Donald Trump had in his term term as president was these

random federal judges,

I think a guy out in Honolulu and somewhere else issuing orders related to immigration policy that restricted for months

implementation of pushbacks.

But I wonder if a Congress that would limit the federal judiciary's

entry into this area for a certain amount of time and a president who would promote a deportation

program that if america would have the stomach for it and the numbers are we've talked about them on past podcasts 62 percent of americans are

in favor of deportation including a majority of uh hispanic americans yeah i think it depends on a couple of things sure one

We had 20 to 25 million illegal aliens, and then we added 8 to 10 million.

So I don't know whether that poll means you want to get rid back, I don't mean get rid of, but push out of the United States the people who came under Biden, which is so flagrant, that have not even been here at the most three years.

I think there's an overwhelming support to deport that 10 million.

Now, the next 20 million, I think there's gradations.

If someone has been here 20 years, he has never broken a law, maybe served in the military, who knows?

I think the people are, they don't want to give them citizenship.

They want to give them a pathway that they can make their own distinctions to give them, they can stay in the United States and apply for a green card or citizenship.

It's up to them.

So out of that 30 million, I don't know how many people have, say, been here for 10 years.

have no criminal record, have not been on public assistance.

And I think a lot of people would say, okay, you shouldn't have come here.

You pay a fine and then you can stay.

Now, the others might be 10 to 15 to 20 million.

And obviously, if you build the wall, you stop it and you deport people right at the wall.

But then to go, I think the attitude is you don't really have to go out and hunt people down in bands.

You just,

first of all, you'd have to cut.

all federal funding to

sanctuary cities, jurisdictions that are violating federal immigration law.

You could just tell them you're not going to get highway funds or something.

So they don't do that.

But I think it would be very easy, and it'll be harder for them to do that given public opinion.

But all of us come in contact with the government, whether our taxes, tax refunds, applying for a license, disability, you name it, traffic ticket.

And all you have to do is have a national computer

base.

And we do.

So anytime somebody's here illegal, he gets a ticket.

He's turned over to ICE and deported.

Anytime somebody goes and gets a DMV and he doesn't have a light, he's deported.

Anytime someone is arrested for anything, he's deported.

You can do that.

And then if you have a secure wall with secure enforcement, they won't be able to come back in.

And this will put a lot of pressure on Mexico and the cartels because they're going to be

This isn't all you can do.

You can stop the cartels from trafficking young women and fentanyl in here.

It'll make it much more difficult.

But you can do other things as well.

You can tax the $60 billion that go to Mexico and the $60 billion that go to Central America with a very high surtax.

Any money sent to

and by the way, the money that's being sent is often subsidized by us.

These are people who are here illegally that are getting government benefits and freeing up cash to send back home.

But you can just say we want 20%,

and that's going to go to the maintenance of of the wall and beefed up security.

And that would be devastating to Mexico.

And they would, and once you do that, you'd have a lot of leverage on Mr.

Oberdor and his successor.

And so

Trump never did that, but he was thinking about it.

And so I think, you know, it would be...

It's practical, but you don't have to go out and have a big sweep of the country.

You can just sit back, pass laws that

courts can't overturn, and then just let the system work automatically.

And believe me,

if the rest of the world is like where I live in Fresno County, I pick up the paper every single day.

I see people on the side of the road.

If you're illegal, you're coming into contact with

federal and state employees almost every day.

I go by a

federally financed health clinic.

People are out the door.

I go by the disability office sometimes.

I have to go down to Fresno.

People are out the door.

So

there you have it.

Okay.

Well, Victor,

maybe we can continue on some daydreaming, mine anyway, you can respond to it, of writing legislation.

This might relate to

the purchase of U.S.

farmland by

Red China.

And let's get to that and some other topics right after these important messages.

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Hey, we're back with the Victor Davis Hansen show.

Victor, on social media in the last week or so,

something must have prompted this.

I'm sure you know and may tell me why, but all of a sudden, lots of concern and maps about

the country with the location of major military bases and significant purchases of farmland around these bases.

And

this is

very troubling.

We've talked about this before,

but I'm wondering how an America reacts to this.

And let's say an America that once again has a president that's not Joe Biden.

It's a Republican president with a Republican-controlled legislature.

That this land

would remain in the hands of Red China, I think, is disastrous.

And

I would suggest

we contemplate some kind of eminent domain national security response.

Do we not have to do something to take this land

out of the hands of China?

I know you've talked in the past about a reciprocity of how

what will we let them do in our country if they let us do the same in their country.

But

we have a current situation here.

How might we handle it?

I think you just have to start with the idea of symmetry or reciprocity with China.

You just tell them you can have as many Chinese students as we have Americans in China.

There's no reason in the world we need 350,000 Chinese students here.

1% would be 3,500 that are engaged in espionage.

And we know how successful they are of appropriating our most sophisticated military technology.

There's no reason that we have to have

Chinese interest with biolab, the United States, no interest, knows no reason why they should have property next to military installations.

There's no reason why 30,000 Chinese males should be allowed to come into the United States illegally.

There's no reason why China should be able to send billions of dollars of fentanyl that they know is killing Americans and then money launder the profits with the cartels.

So what do you do about it?

A lot of it, you start with the universities and the universities are charging Middle East and Chinese students full plus tuition, room and board, and they use them as moneymakers and they're

it's just out of control.

And we need to tell them, you're not, this is the amount of foreign students you can have and no more, and don't issue so many visas.

And then we have to tell the Chinese, how many American students are in China right now?

10,000?

You can have 10,000 Chinese students, period.

and then we need to tell them there's no can can american citizens go into china and buy land if if we can't you can't either very simple do

americans get to do you have 30 000 americans that are entering your country illegally no you don't oh you can't do it either that's very simple to do it's not provocative

because there has to be a reason i mean what what is the purpose of a biolab in readley california what is the purpose of a balloon taking pictures with impunity?

What is the purpose of these people buying a quarter million acres around airstrips and military bases and missile silos?

What is the purpose of working with the cartels to kill 100,000 Americans?

It's a kind of a Cold War that they're waging.

And we're just...

I don't know whether the Biden family is compromised because of all the money and people that Hunter Biden had connected with in China.

We know a lot of money came from China, the family, and maybe they're afraid that if they get clamped down, there'll be some embarrassing laptops from hell to come that would be devastating during an election.

Who knows?

But it's very strange that this administration doesn't take simple

steps to protect our national interests.

But we can do it.

And I think everybody's, I don't know, I think everybody's,

I i can't explain it they're they're they want something they want to get back in the game they want to get engaged again they want to build up our defense they don't want people they don't they want to establish certain protocols they want ships to go through the red sea and if the houthis keep shooting missiles at them they want them just to take out their power grid just say how do you like that We're not, we don't want to get into your Godforsaken country.

We won't let one American step in.

But you keep doing that, and you're going to be living without power and then no air force, nothing.

And that would be very easy to do.

Trump did it with ISIS.

And they want to pump oil.

They want to say to the Middle East, you know what, we don't need anything you have.

We don't care what OPEC does.

That's your business.

We're not going to beg Venezuela or Iran for oil like Biden did.

Are you crazy?

We're going to fill the petroleum reserve to 110%.

We're going to drill, baby, drill.

We have precious metals all over the western United States.

We're going to build plants.

We're going to have so much materials for electric batteries.

No problem.

That's the kind of stuff they want.

And if Trump can articulate that, he'll blow Biden out of the water.

Because

I think everybody's tired of these snotty little kids somewhere between 18 and 30 with bullhorns that show up at people's houses on bridges and that shrill, whiny Antifa.

Justice for Palestine going, yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah.

They're sick of that.

And they don't don't want those people.

They want if they break the law, they should go to jail.

And they just want a return of normality and law.

And we've had these periods in American history before, and they're very powerful.

And I think one of them was Ronald Reagan, you know, morning in America when he ran for re-election.

But earlier it was

everybody gets angry, but it was make America great again.

He's the one that first started it.

And

I can remember people saying in 1980, I had just finished graduate school, and they were saying,

Reagan doesn't have a chance.

He's too far right.

He's never held federal office.

Carter's an incumbent.

Carter's not that bad.

And then people thought, well, okay, yeah, kind of, sort of.

But then as the campaign went on and they got sick of listening to Carter's lectures and sanctimonious scolds,

and they just wanted something different.

They wanted to get moving again.

And that's what Reagan did.

The knock on Reagan at the time,

amongst the knocks,

was that he was a dope.

And about a year ago, I was going through some old firing line videos, which are up on YouTube.

By the way, they're terrific.

Anyone wants to reminisce about great interviews,

Bill Buckley and

the many people he had on his show in the 60s, 70s, 80s.

Anyway, he had Ronald Reagan on, and Ronald Reagan was his friend um but that said said bill was not um throwing him softballs like the kind of questions cbs or cnn would give joe biden now

and reagen was terrific he was i did in hindsight you wonder like how could they have the nerve to call this guy uh no he was great remember he had that little i i remember being in

in an undergraduate and I would drive in my old little 544 Bobo with his scratchy radio that went on all the time.

But he had some, it was like a one-minute, you remember he had a one-minute

commercial radio commentaries.

Yeah, and it would just, it would kind of like Paul Harvey, and it would just come on.

He was really smooth, and it was really good.

And

I remember that very well.

He was really good.

That's why he became famous, because he was a great communicator.

And he was good at

ad hoc and repartee.

He had quips.

He had a fiery temper.

He would lose every once in a while.

For and that helped him, even.

He said some pretty tough stuff.

People forget that.

He said, I remember I was a senior in high school.

He said, if these people up at Berkeley want a bloodbath,

getting back to the word bloodbath that they said Trump used, Trump said it about the auto industry.

Reagan didn't.

He said it about people.

He said, if they want a bloodbath, let's get it over with.

And

he was uncompromising.

Was your family, which were Democrats,

was there any fondness of feelings among them for Reagan?

Well, it was very

asking.

They were Democrats.

My dad was a Democrat, but he was a, I don't know what you'd call him, Harry Truman.

I mean, he was the kind of Democrat when the first Gulf War came.

He came in to my little office on the farm, a little lean-too with a swamp cooler in it, and he put a map of Iraq on and he said, turn on Rush.

And he would, Rush was always, you know,

he, you know, he had during that Gulf War, he had so many different brilliant imitations of generals and everything.

And my dad was that kind of guy.

He didn't hate anybody and he liked, he was a conservative Democrat.

My mom was more doctrinaire, but she was

she was to the right of Bill Clinton.

But in those days, that was possible to be a Democrat.

But

my dad, they had, it was really funny.

They were, they got to be very friendly with

some friends of theirs that worked in the Pete Wilson administration.

So that was some of their closest friends.

And

when they would come over,

they were retired, that couple,

and they would kind of get in polite arguments, but they vacationed together and they liked them.

And there was a couple of Jerry Brown-appointed Democratic judges that were pretty conservative that my mom hung out with.

She wasn't friendly with the late-stage Jerry Brown nutty appointments.

But I mean, he appointed her as a pellet court judge because she was a mom that had three children that lived in a 900-square-foot home on a farm as the fourth generation on the farm.

and

had gone as an undergraduate to University of Pacific for a bachelor's, then to Stanford for a bachelor's, and then to Stanford Law School.

She was one of the first women to do that.

She graduated in 46 from law school.

And then unlike the power trajectory, she just didn't go, you know, oh, sorry, I'm not going to get married.

I can't have kids.

She married my father and they moved back to this farm to help my grandparents.

And they lived in this little shack.

It was a very small little house we lived in.

And then

she had a daughter who died.

She had German measles, and that was tough after a year to lose that daughter.

And then she had three of us.

And she didn't go to work till she was 40 years old.

And everybody even made fun of her on the ranch.

They'd say, oh, Mr.

Davis, your daughter's got a Stanford law degree, and she's just a housewife.

Ha ha.

But she was, she took it.

She really homeschooled us.

We went to regular school, but she was a wonderful mother.

And she wasn't an ideologue.

I know that my members of my family who were very far left would disagree with me, but their leftism was different.

Theirs came from UC Santa Cruz.

We all went there.

It was a generational leftism.

And then farming,

farming makes people have strange,

the transition from family farming to corporate farming makes a lot of people,

I think in some cases it takes people further left because they think that corporate farming is taking over and all that stuff.

No,

that was the thing.

And it is, right?

It is, it is.

So, and I had some sympathies for that at one time about

the rigging of the fruit markets and monopolies and all that.

But anyway, my point is that it was,

I remember my mom said something because she was a state employee and my dad was a, he had stopped farming and he was a full-time junior college administrator.

And one day, Reagan, I think it was around 83,

she looked at me and said, you will not believe the difference in our check.

And I said, what do you mean?

I didn't know much about it.

I was, you know, she just said,

I was in graduate school.

She said, we got money back.

I cannot believe this.

And she was, that kind of changed her.

Yeah.

But

they didn't, she, it was really weird.

She was always.

talking about Nancy Reagan.

She thought, as a woman about the same age, she always thought Nancy Reagan, I mean, my mom was not a Republican socialite, wealthy woman, but she always had kind of an admiration.

She'd say, look at how Nancy Reagan dresses, look at her coat.

And she was always impressed with the, I guess the word would be elegance.

And

that was a different group of Democrats.

All of their friends were Republican.

It's very funny.

I used to tease my mom about it.

My dad, I said, you guys vote Democratic, but every single person you hang out is Republicans.

And my dad said,

why would that that be, Victor?

It wouldn't be that they're nicer people and they don't hit you over the head every day with their stupid ideas.

So that was, that was fun.

Well, I have another California thing to ask you about.

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Victor,

as we head into the end of June, into July, I'm sure it's hot as heck out where you are.

I'm just curious.

107 today here in Isbo.

That's all.

Okay.

Dang.

108 tomorrow.

That sure as heck dries up water.

I'm curious compared to last year with all the water.

I remember one day visiting you guys and our friends up there in Fresno and that

canal right near the airport was just full and flowing.

That's Fresno Irrigation District.

Yeah.

Is it still, is it like that?

Yeah, or

totally dry also.

Okay.

It's not like 150% snowmelt we had last year, but this year, water year, it was about 110%.

But if you go by one of the great barometers, San Luis Reservoir on Highway 152 on the way to the coast from the valley, it's 30% down.

And that is fed by the aqueduct.

The aqueduct, you know, comes from the major watersheds of Northern California, the Feather River, the Kalamath River, the American River, and these great combined Central Valley projects and the California Water Project.

So Oroville Dam,

Folsom Dam, all of these, that's where the water in California is.

I mean, we get some from the Sierra Nevada.

from the Kings River and San Joaquin, but that watershed that ends up eventually in the Sacramento River is about five times more of the water of the second, the lower watershed, the southern one, the San Joaquin Valley.

But my point is this, when it goes to the delta, it dumps into the delta and then it's pumped out.

It kind of takes like a tiddly wink.

It skips over the dotted.

They put the fresh water in the semi

where the water is still fresh going out into the delta.

from other rivers and then they pump it back into the aqueduct and then that aqueduct goes down about about a hundred miles

and it spreads everywhere.

So some of it goes to the Bay Area, that Crystal Springs, that big thing on 280, it's about 10 miles long.

That gives a water for a lot of San Francisco that, you know, that

they don't get from the Sierra.

And then at San Jose.

And then it goes further down and it fills up San Luis Reservoir.

And that's for San Jose and farming, supposedly.

And then it goes down further and it's like a big artery and there's little capillaries they've tapped off in Santa Barbara, San Luis Obispo,

and then you get down to L.A.

and they pump it large, that's the highest pumping, I think, in the world, Comstocks, and it goes over the mountains into this,

it's one of the five major water sources for Los Angeles, you know,

in addition to the Owens Valley and Colorado River and local water districts.

But my point is this, is that when you look at the San Luis Reservoir, it's not not full.

So why is it not full?

It's not full because when that huge snowmelt is pouring into the delta,

the pumps are not pumping most of it on the other side of the delta.

In other words, they're letting that water go out to the ocean, and they're letting that water go out to the ocean supposedly to

do two things, to allow rivers to be full

in that area.

But more importantly, they have this little barometer they call the delta smell, a little three-inch bait fish.

And they feel that if it's healthy, then there's lots of them, then

they've saved the smell.

But they don't ever say to themselves, well, why isn't it numerous?

Maybe it's striped bass that are artificially introduced as game fish that eat them.

Or maybe it's the 35 municipal waste plants

around the Bay Area that put too much nitrogen in.

But whatever it is, they take that from farmers.

So

the water contracts have not been met.

And then when the water goes south, it's increasingly diverted for municipalities.

So San Luis, that big, huge 3 million acre-feet project that John Kennedy and BF6 created was 100%.

for Westland's Water District and surrounding water district.

And it's not there now.

It's either not full because the water has been let out before it arrives, or it's been given to the cities of San Jose and other places.

And so the whole point is to take 5 million acres out of production, get back to about 1950.

And that's the idea that these people do not like almonds.

They do not like corporate farming.

And when you get, but they're so stupid because when you go into whole foods and you look at grapes and tomatoes and it's all from that area.

And they think, well, it's all farmers' market.

No, it's not.

Most of it is very nutritious.

It's very carefully grown.

It's very carefully inspected for pesticides, fungicides.

There's a lot of organic corporate food that goes there.

But they want to shoot themselves in the foot.

That's what's so weird about it.

So they're deliberately letting water.

It's kind of a larger pattern in California.

I wrote about that last week where

we have enough water.

It's a brilliant system that our grandparents devised, the Central Valley Project and our great-grandparents,

the Central Valley, and then the California Water Project.

And it takes two-thirds of the water from where one-third people live into where two-thirds of people live.

And it's a desert, a state, and it works.

And then it hasn't been enlarged since 1983 when we only have 20 million.

Now we have 41 million people.

So they're deliberately trying to destroy it.

And I don't know what they think they're doing.

And somebody's going to say, well, Victor, there's a logic to it.

No, there isn't.

They're importing oil from Saudi Arabia, natural gas from Alaska and Canada, timber from Canada.

We have some of the greatest deposits of natural gas and oil.

I think we're number five of the 50 states.

We have the Monterey Shale Formation, enough natural gas for...

the rest of our lives.

We have huge, there were 30 or 40 timber companies when I grew up.

There's two now.

We lost 60 million trees in these last three big fires.

60 million.

They would rather have them burn up naturally, decompose, and then provide fodder for crickets and bugs and echo.

They say that rather than to use that.

And that's why timber,

lumber is so expensive in California.

We have all

the Mojave Desert has rare minerals that can be used for electric vehicle, but they don't allow any of that.

So they're, they're war, they really really do believe that you eat Facebook and you drink Twitter

and you can have a nice Charlborough Google steak.

They think that there's so much money, $9 trillion there, that they don't need any of this.

You know, you don't really need to eat or drive or cool down your home.

They're crazy people.

I say that because I know them.

I work in that area.

When I go out, when I'm up at Stanford during the week,

I listen to people on campus.

I go to eat by myself.

Usually I listen to people talking.

And then some people come by my office or people call me

and the majority of them are stark raving mad.

Okay.

Well,

stark raving mad, Victor, also describes the Democrats.

Thank you for that update on California.

It'd be interesting to someone come up to you while you're eating, by the way, at Stanford and actually be a fan.

I know, I've had that.

I've had that.

Okay.

I have that at least 20 times the last year where a person will come up.

I'll be in a bakery in Menlo Park on my way to my wonderful ophthalmologist

whose name, I don't mention doctor's name.

It's a wonderful doctor, and I'll be sitting in a bakery, and somebody will come up.

I'll bay it.

They'll look both ways, you know,

and

they'll say something, or I'll go to the wonderful

Vita Bistro on downtown Santa Cruz Avenue in Menela Park.

There's a wonderful guy that owns it, and it's a wonderful place.

It's apolitical, but I just go there a lot when I'm there to eat, and I'll have people come up to me, even left-wing people.

They'll say things like,

you know, I don't like Fox, but you don't shout on Fox.

I'll give you that.

That's what they'll say.

Stuff like that.

Yeah.

But mostly, and then I've had the bad stuff too, where some person comes up and says, why don't you shut the F up?

You know, stuff like that.

Lovely.

Lovely.

Yeah.

Well, it deserves, it deserves in kind.

And that's, I think, what

we'll segue temperamentally the next topic and maybe the final topic of this particular episode about how some conservatives are

plotting.

to play very hardball with the Democrats if their candidate is not Joe Biden.

And we will get your thoughts on this, Victor, right after we return from these final important messages.

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We're back with the Victor Davis-Hansen Show.

Victor, today, again, we're recording on Saturday, the 22nd.

This episode is out on the 27th of June.

The Daily Mail published a story.

It's the headline, How Conservatives Could Make It Very Hard for Democrats to Replace Biden on the 2024 ballot if he has a disastrous debate or steps aside.

Bear with me here, folks, a second.

An influential Republican group is already prepping for a counterfight should Democrats try to pull Joe Biden off the top of the ticket due to the rapid decline President Biden, as seen by his bizarre episode of G7, the Oversight Project, is taking the unprecedented step to release this draft, said Mike Howell, executive director.

of the Heritage Foundation's Oversight Project in a statement.

We are monitoring the calls from across the country for President Biden to step aside either now or before the election election and have concluded that the process for substitution and withdrawal is very complicated.

We will remain vigilant that appropriate election integrity procedures are allowed.

Dot, dot, dot.

The Heritage Oversight Project has their sights set on three contentious swing states where they believe taking Biden off the Democrat.

ticket would not allow anyone else to replace him, Georgia, Nevada, and Wisconsin.

Victor, we've talked about, and you've talked about at length, you know,

pushing back, punching back

hard.

How else are these SOBs on the left going to learn?

This, I think, is

a kind of a punchback hard thought.

I'm heartened to see it.

I don't know.

You may or may not be.

Any thoughts?

I have just, on all these issues, I just have two.

I always have two principles.

Number one,

would it be symmetrical?

So let's just say that Donald Trump just completely melts down.

You know what I mean?

He's golfing and he breaks his golf club or does something crazy and they want to get rid of him.

It's not going to happen.

And they want to put DeSantis on the ballot.

But there's some blue states, maybe purple states, like Wisconsin or Minnesota, where it's technically too late.

What would the left do?

Would they say, oh, don't worry, we're don't, or would they sue to stop that happening?

I don't think our listeners need to be told what they would do.

Of course, they would stop any Republican from getting on the ballot if the nominee was incapacitated.

And then, number two, is it legal or not?

I mean, they're suing, so

there's a deadline, and then it's either going to be lawful or not.

So, are the Democrats trying to get exemptions from the law and the Republicans trying to get exemptions from the law?

Or is it just let the law

the law be

enforced if there's a rule that says after this particular date you cannot add or subtract a candidate then do it that's simple and

and i from what little i know about their lawsuits it seems that there are in some states strict deadlines and the democrats i think feel that they can get by them but

it it i i don't think that's the democrats worry we've never done this before we've we won't the closest we've ever done anything like this this late is in 1944 when the head honchos of the Democratic Party looked at FDR and they went to him and they said, you're failing.

And he was in,

he was not cognitively declined like

Biden.

He was not at all, but he was physically in much worse shape.

He was, you know, the years of smoking and martinis and the stress of the job and polio.

It wasn't going down to Warm Springs.

He died there, of course, but he wasn't vigorous swimmer anymore.

And he was not in his early 50s.

You know, he was in the 60s.

And they went to him and said, Henry Wallace, your vice president, you may like him.

He may get the base fired up.

He may have been a farmer, but he is a communist.

And if you die, he will go soft on the Soviet Union.

And the war is starting to wind down.

It's 1944.

And the Soviets are going to beat the Germans, and we're going to have another problem, and that is how far west are they going to go?

Are they going to take all of the Balkans?

Are they going to take all of Eastern Europe?

Are they going to be watering their horses in the Thames?

Who knows?

We've got to stop that.

And Henry Wallace won't.

And so I want you.

And they looked around.

And Harry Truman was an old-fashioned Missouri machine guy, kind of corrupt

from Kansas City.

And he had been on a lot of committees that were looking at fraud and waste and defense procurement.

And

they put him on the ticket, and Roosevelt didn't like him.

He didn't tell him anything about it.

And then he died in April of 1945, just as everybody thought he would.

And here we had a guy who wasn't briefed at all.

And he turned out to be, for a Democrat, a pretty good president, at least in terms of foreign policy.

He started the pushback against the Soviet.

Remember his famous thing, that son of a bitch, excuse me, but that's what Truman said, that son of a bitch, Stalin lied to me.

So, I mean, I disagree with a lot of stuff that Truman did, but he was not a bad president.

But my point is that was a radical thing to do, to take a vice president who was currently vice president and tell him, you are not going to be vice president anymore, and we're taking you off the ballot.

And they did it at the convention.

And Roosevelt wasn't really either

able to stop them or he wasn't supportive of it necessarily.

Yeah.

Henry Wallace was a tragic figure because, you know, as I remember, he had a seed company.

He was a multi-millionaire for a communist, Marxist.

But everybody liked him as a pleasant person.

And then as he got older and older and older, he became more and more conservative.

I think he voted for Nixon.

Well, he endorsed

Eisenhower in 56 and he sat out the 60 campaign, but he became friendly with Nixon.

They corresponded.

Then he got Lou Gehrig's disease, didn't he?

I think he did.

He had a tragic ending.

Yeah, well, that I don't know, but he, yeah, he,

I think he,

I think he had some patents too from the seed staff.

Oh, yeah, he did.

That's what made his wealth.

It wasn't just his company.

He, uh,

but he was,

you know, he, that was kind of a, I mean, he lived.

I remember I was 10 or 12 when he died.

And

people were talking that, as I remember, and I don't know, they were talking about the transformation in his later life.

He had been

far less radical.

Yeah, he wrote some book, Where I Was Wrong.

you know, how I was wrong.

Yeah, didn't he went into business again, too, as I remember.

Yeah, I think I'm going to, I'm going to search.

I think he actually wrote for some issues of National Review in the late 50s.

So I got to find that out.

He was feeding it.

I mean,

he was a brilliant seed chemist.

I remember his, I think he had one of the biggest

feed companies in the United States.

Yeah.

And

well, well, Victor, going,

we're going to go back in time a little bit before we end the end the show.

I have a question of actually, it's a question from a big fan about

time.

But before I do that, speak time, I'm going to take a minute, a minute to welcome back our great sponsor, Hillsdale College.

Hey, listeners, did you know that Victor is one of the professors in three of the over 40 free online courses at Hillsdale College?

That is right.

Victor's first course is titled American Citizenship and Its Decline, which is based on Victor's best-selling book, The Dying Citizen.

The second course, The Second World Wars, is based on Victor's bestseller by the

same name.

And then the third course, Athens and Sparta, is partly based on Victor's book, A War Like No Other: How the Athenians and Spartans Fought the Peloponnesian War.

Courses are seven to nine episodes long.

They're self-paced, so you can take them whenever and wherever.

Go right now or after this episode to hillsdale.edu slash VDH to start.

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And we thank our good friends at Hillsdale College for sponsoring the Victor Davis Hansen Show.

And Victor, that third course there about Athens and Sparta, segues into

the question from Vivek, who sent this to me through Facebook.

I'm just curious about your views on

time.

And here's what he wrote.

What year did the ancient Greeks and Romans think it was?

And what did they base it on?

We give them BC dates, but only because Jesus.

So he talked about some of the Peloponnesian wars and what years we say they occurred in.

But

how do we know for sure when they occurred?

And how did these ancient civilizations keep track of time?

That's the essential question, Victor.

I think you know a thing or two about this.

Yeah.

Well, the Romans, well, start with the Greeks, they had

a Pan-Hellenic year system based on the first, the supposed 776 date

of the founding of the Olympic Games.

So every date

was from 776

on.

They just picked that, what we call 776 BC.

They had another number for it.

And then the Romans had something called AUC, Ab Urbat Condita, from the founding of the city, which was legendary at, I think, 752, 751, 752.

And so those numbers start at that date.

And then in the 18th and 19th century,

with the rise of classical scholarship, people began to convert those.

So if you look at a book that's, say, written around 1810, classics books, they will have the Olympic or the AUC dates

still there.

So they had record keeping in panellinic sanctuaries.

If you go to Athens, for example, there's still a tower of the winds there,

and it has a sundial on every four, all sides that would measure the hours of the day.

So they did know

about the equinox,

the summer equinox.

And they knew the winter, the solstice.

They knew exactly the day, the longest day of the year.

They knew the shortest day of the year.

And they knew the two dates when the night and day were exactly equal.

And out of that knowledge came the idea that,

and the problem, let me just backtrack.

The problem with the Greek calendar was not a solar calendar, so it was a lunar calendar.

So they did have monthly

idea was that it was based on the new moon appearing, disappearing.

That was 30 days.

But as you know, that's not an accurate assessment.

So they had to keep adding intercalinary months to get into

because then soon the winter didn't look like winter anymore after a couple of years because of the inexactness of the

365 days when the sun makes a complete circuit.

That does not correspond to

day 12 months of a of a moon appearing and disappearing.

It didn't do that.

It did it 29 days, 30 days, and you'd lose those dates and then pretty soon after four or five years, you're way out.

So they tried to add particular months and they really didn't get going until the Julian and then

later the Gregorian calendar where they had a pretty sophisticated idea of leap year.

And then they could make sure that, you know, every June 22nd

looked like every other June 22nd, as far as the weather and your shadow.

And they could tell,

the Romans used it by watches, you know, the first watch, second watch, third watch, fourth watch.

I think they were six hours.

But the Greeks

and the Romans had sundials.

that would give you, break the day into 12 hours.

And

like today

12 hours and the Roman and the Greeks also had introduced water clocks so there was a huge water clock and it had a drip or a pitcher and by the time it it took to drain this large vessel they would know exactly how many hours that was or etc breakdown

but uh again

that was a that was a big uh challenge of converting classical

calendars into BC and AD.

And that

that was something that I think, as I remember, the Germans

and German scholars and British scholars did.

And I was always shocked because when I started as a classical scholar,

I was working on

classical military history and agriculture.

And some of this was not a popular topic.

And some of the stuff that you look at was written around 18, you know,

really early in the 19th century.

And every once in a while,

you'd see books where you had the original, it would say AUC on it.

And it would be some number that made no sense at all because it was not converted into BC or AC.

Right.

Well,

one last big sundial.

or

Timekeeper, maybe with Stonehenge.

I think I've read that.

Did you see those punks, those

echo terrorists, losers threw orange powder paint on Stonehenge the other day?

Well, I don't understand what was the purpose of it.

To be assholes, I guess.

Why did they pick it?

Was it the idea that

Stonehenge was a calendar?

Why were they picking that?

Or is it a tourist?

I think just why would they try to deface the Mona Lisa?

Maybe that's oil-based paint.

I I don't know.

Maybe there's some oil angle there, climate stuff.

But anyway, just more maddening wokeness in the public theater from the.

But

I don't understand why they get away with it.

Yeah, that's, yeah, right.

And I think two of them seem like they were immigrants by their names to Britain.

Maybe they were citizens.

But the idea that people can destroy the collective heritage of an entire people, or at least try to destroy it.

I felt the same way about Stanford because, you know, I was a little boy when my mom had an alumni there and I went there and they have that sandstone architecture that's very porous.

It's not sealed like, you know, slick obsidian or something,

igneous rock.

And when you see people go

down there and like kill the police in red paint and that soaks into that sandstone

of that beautiful Romanesque architecture.

I mean, they can get it out, but they have to do something to the surface to abrase it or something.

And the idea that these kids or punks would do that, and that university doesn't belong to them.

It belongs to the alumni, the board of trustees, the donors, faculty, the administration.

It's not just the people who happen to be there at that particular time.

And so far, I'm watching that case very clearly because the people who broke into the president's office, burglarized it, and defaced a lot of the corridors and colonnades, they're still facing felonies.

Even the reporter who, the person who went along and was tipped off and participated and said, oh, by the way, I'm a reporter.

I work for the Sanford Daily.

That didn't work so far.

It's like the Hamas reporter.

Yeah, just all you have to do is expel.

All you have to do is give them a fair hearing.

And if any are found guilty of felonious behavior, you should not just suspend them.

You should expel them.

And then they would not graduate.

And then their parents and people would say, what did the blank, we sent you there to get branded with this elite degree and we sacrificed and look what you did.

And maybe they could grow up and go to a community college and then face the real world.

And as far as the foreign students, and as I understand it at Stanford, about 40% are foreign students, undergraduate and graduate students.

Stanford should just, if they're convicted of a felony, they should turn that name over to ICE.

And if we have a normal ICE, they should cancel the student visa and say, you know what?

You don't like your host.

You came over here in the guest.

You tried to deface and break your host's law.

Obviously, we want to do you a favor because you hate the United States.

You go back home.

And we promise never to go your country and you never come to ours.

And how's

You go back to Jordan.

You go back to Gaza.

You go back to the West Bank.

Go back to Lebanon.

Have a beautiful life in Beirut.

You know, enjoy Cairo to the fullest.

I hope you can get a great job in Damascus, but just don't hang out here.

And I will promise you, and I've been to all those places, and I will never go back there again.

I'll give up that great sacrifice in my life.

I will never go back there.

That's what we should say to them.

Right.

Live la vida loca, friends, whatever your loca is.

Speaking of Stanford, Victor, you know, we get comments on this show.

People rated on Apple, iTunes, we thank them for doing that.

4.9 plus is the rating.

And some people leave comments.

And one is titled

Jim Plunkett.

I enjoyed Victor's recounting of Jim Plunkett's football career.

Two amazing facts to add.

Jim's parents were legally blind.

And as a consequence,

his family's financial situation was always tenuous.

Originally drafted by the perennially inept Boston Patriots, Plunkett was seen as the savior of this luckless franchise.

Jim's team was extremely weak, and the coaching staff and management even worse.

He literally ran for his life during his five seasons with the Pats.

Somehow, despite the tough hand he was dealt, Plunkett persevered and won two Super Bowls and Super Bowl MVPs, providing good guys can finish first.

He should be in the NFL Hall of Fame fame.

And this is signed by NBPT Eagle.

I remember you talking, you maybe talked on a couple of shows, but it's a great recounting you gave in the past on Jim

Plunkett.

He's a wonderful person.

I met him once when I was a graduate student.

I was in the Stanford Shopping Center, and he walked in.

I'd never done that before.

Walked up to him.

I walked up to him and said, I'm a big fan.

He said, thanks.

That's what he said.

Thank you.

I didn't realize how big he was either.

And he had taken a terrible beating at

with the Patriots at a very weak offensive line.

So they beat him up all the time.

He was indestructible.

He was really muscular and big.

And then everybody thought he was going to be all through with Oakland and San Francisco, and he wasn't.

More power to him.

Hey,

I forgot to mention earlier, folks, the Blade of Perseus is Victor's website, victorhanson.com.

Go there, sign up.

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Five bucks a month, $50 discounted for the full year.

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Because you're a fan of everything Victor writes.

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But there'll be articles, ultra-articles that Victor writes exclusively for the Blade of Perseus, two or three a week.

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So, if you're a fan of Victor's writings, and of course you are, go ahead and do that.

As for me, Jack Fowler, I write Civil Thoughts, the free weekly email newsletter for the Center for Civil Society, where we are trying to strengthen civil society.

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Victor,

I think that's about it.

You've been terrific.

I hope you continue to be on the health upswing.

You and the great.

Yeah, my goal is

today is 14 days.

Mrs.

Hansen is up and

well.

I

have kind of long COVID stuff, but I'm going to be over it in a week.

That's my goal.

Good.

All right.

And I'm trying to shock it by exercise.

Well,

we'll pray to Saint

Saint Nostrus or something.

St.

Nazo.

When I had my sinus surgery, I remember you wrote me and said, we're going to pray to St.

Nazo.

You made that up.

I don't.

Oh, that's hard.

There's no Saint Nazle.

There's no N-A-S-O.

No.

We'll look it up.

You have a photograph.

I know there's

a

Saint

Covidius?

Probably, like a third

martyr.

Covidius longus.

Maybe I can beat them.

St.

Anthony of Fauci.

Yeah, that's

all right.

Vic, you've been terrific.

Thanks so much.

We thank all our sponsors.

We thank you folks for listening.

And we'll be back soon with another episode of the Victor Davis Hansen Show.

Bye-bye.

Thank you, everybody.